A drone is an unmanned aerial vehicle, which is deployed in a particular Fly Zone (FZ), and used to collect crucial information from its surrounding environment to be transmitted to the server for further processing. Generally, a Mobile User (MU) is required to access the real-time information collected by the drone stationed in a specific FZ securely. Therefore, to ensure secure and reliable communications an Authenticated Key Exchange (AKE) protocol is imperative to the Internet of Drone (IoD) environment. An AKE scheme ensures only authentic MU to access IoD network resources. Upon successful authentication, MU and drone can set up a secret session key for secure communication in the future. This paper presents a novel Lightweight AKE Protocol for IoD Environment (LAKE-IoD), which first ensures the authenticity of MU and also renders session key establishment mechanism between MU and drone with the help of a server. LAKE-IoD is an AKE protocol, which is based on an authenticated encryption scheme AEGIS, hash function, and bit-wise XOR operation. Meticulous formal security verification by employing a software tool known as Scyther and informal security analysis demonstrates that LAKE-IoD is protected against different well-known active and passive security attacks. Additionally, Burrows-Abadi-Needham logic is applied to verify the logical completeness of LAKE-IoD. Furthermore, a comparison of LAKE-IoD with the related schemes shows that LAKE-IoD incurs less communication, computational and storage overhead.

The revolutionary advancement in the capabilities of hardware tools, software packages, and communication techniques gave rise to the Internet of Things-supported drone networks (IoD), thereby enabling smooth communication among devices and applications, and impacting drastically the various aspects of human lives. However, with the increasing sophistication in the infrastructure of IoD, new security threats arise that require novel algorithms and schemes as solutions. To this end, several schemes have recently been proposed. However, some schemes cannot perfectly address the novel security aspects associated with IoD environments, while others cannot provide computational or communication efficiency. Motivated by these research gaps in the existing literature, we leverage elliptic curve cryptography along with symmetric encryption and hash function, and propose a novel and robust user authentication mechanism for the IoD, called RUAM-IoD. We validate the security of the established SK formally through the random oracle model. Similarly, we provide informal security analysis to demonstrate the security capabilities of RUAM-IoD against different pernicious security attacks. Likewise, we establish a comparison of the RUAM-IoD with several state-of-the-art authentication schemes to show that RUAM-IoD acquires less storage, communication, and computational cost.

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Smart grid (SG) recently acquired considerable attention due to their utilization in sustaining demand response management in power systems. Smart meters (SMs) deployed in SG systems collect and transmit data to the server. Since all communications between SM and the server occur through a public communication channel, the transmitted data are exposed to adversary attacks. Therefore, security and privacy are essential requirements in the SG system for ensuring reliable communication. Additionally, an AuthentiCation (AC) protocol designed for secure communication should be lightweight so it can be applied in a resource-constrained environment. In this article, we devise a lightweight AC protocol for SG named LACP-SG. LACP-SG employs the hash function, “Esch256”, and “authenticated encryption” to accomplish the AC phase. The proposed LACP-SG assures secure data exchange between SM and server by validating the authenticity of SM. For encrypted communication, LACP-SG enables SM and the server to establish a session key (SEK). We use the random oracle model to substantiate the security of the established SEK. Moreover, we ascertain that LACP-SG is guarded against different security vulnerabilities through Scyther-based security validation and informal security analysis. Furthermore, comparing LACP-SG with other related AC protocols demonstrates that LACP-SG is less resource-intensive while rendering better security characteristics.